


This is the girl

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Character Study, F/F, tuc fic exchange
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-25
Updated: 2014-12-25
Packaged: 2018-03-03 09:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2846423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[a character study of Elizabeth “Lizzie” Campbell]</p>
<p>"See here; look closely. This is the girl that she is, and the one she becomes."</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is the girl

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FingertipsofRose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FingertipsofRose/gifts).



> For the TUC Fic Exchange 2014! Prompt was “anything about lizzie”
> 
> I...might have taken that a bit far.
> 
> Just a bit.

She is strange, and she is nervous, often, and she is shy. She likes puzzles better than people. Her name is Elizabeth Campbell. Her family calls her Lizzie.

Many a tentative axis is she built around, this Lizzie. The outside world is awe-inspiring, in the old sense of the word, and should be approached only with caution; the numbers and letters speak to her in ways both clear and concise, the ways people don’t, because they think that young and girl and stupid are all the same thing and they speak accordingly; her father is gone and has been since she was very young. She can’t remember the distant times of before, when she wasn’t strange. Her formative years are after she turned four; the mockery of those who still had fathers made her timid. When she was six, a kindergarten teacher had to teach her what a “papa” was. (She’d always called hers “daddy,” but that didn’t matter, apparently, not then.)

The teacher had already had conferences with the parent(s), so that teacher knew anyway. The eyes that teacher put on her were strange, and she didn’t like the look. It was too disapproving, too sad, too contemptible. Little Lizzie went very quiet, mumbling, and from that moment she was shy. Lizzie was shy.

The life of the Campbells was...precarious. Maybe it wasn’t, once. But it was by the time Lizzie was old enough to know. This was a little earlier than most children - Lizzie is precocious, this is another thing that she is - but still only five or so. Their mother Grace, she worked from dawn until dusk. Grandma took care of them, before she couldn’t anymore, and instead sat in her rocking chair caught between some sticky bits of the past.

The Campbells ran short on things, when there was a little too much month left at the end of the money. They ran short on food, and heat, and sometimes water, too. When Lizzie wrecked some of her clothes during the last weeks of a particularly bad month, playing in puddles, and her mother sighed, Lizzie watched the grief make caverns in her mother’s face and Lizzie learned guilt. Worry, too. She feared what it meant, that sad resigned look, and she grew nervous. Somehow, that just never stopped growing. This was a thing she was. Lizzie was nervous. The fear has a tangible presence, another organ of her body which she could feel and taste and touch, if she was feeling daring about it. She didn’t have the right words for describing it, so she used all the wrong ones, and hoped that came close: words like “coppery” and “astringent” and “nebulous” and “dischord.” Lizzie felt fear; Lizzie was nervous.

Brilliance isolated her. Oh, Lizzie is smart, she is so smart that it hurts. Seven-year-olds didn’t know words like that. Lizzie Campbell was a very, very smart little girl. She could do sums, and complicated problems in her head. She played word games more easily than she spoke plainly about a thing. She noticed things, things other children didn’t notice, like the way her mother sat in the kitchen at night and made horrible soft noises of grief, or how Grandma’s eyes wandered more and more, or how teachers and peers alike looked at her sometimes frankly, like they didn’t know what to make of her and weren’t even considering to attempt.

So she is brilliant, and shy, and nervous, that summer when her brother stands at the bus stop and smiles and promises her that she should definitely go off to summer camp, despite the fact that he already looks just about bored to tears. She goes, and nothing of note occurs.

And then she has her father back. This is interesting; she has never had a father before, she doesn’t know what to do, or what it’ll be like. She thinks she might be excited about it, in a way.

(This is, of course, after she hears the full story of what happened down there, and looks her father in the face for the first time she can remember. She thinks it all over, really gets into the mental nitty-gritty details quick as a flash inside her head, and starts backing up with her hands rising to cover her nose and mouth, eyes watering. When the man - her father - reaches for her in concern, she bolts, eyes streaming and sobs muffled behind her hands; behind her, she hears Gregor say “Don’t worry, she doesn’t hate you; she gets scared.” She then proceeded to lock herself in the bathroom and do just that. It was all very usual, except the part where her mother was too distraught to remember to come find her, and she worked through the fear on her own for the first time. It went badly, of course, but it went.)

Having a father, as it turned out, was not so different than not having a father. There was a sick man who they - Gregor, mostly - looked after during the day as well as Grandma, and Mama looked less sad but often more worried, especially at the end of the month. Gregor did as he always did: helped Mama. (Lizzie thought, as she always did, that this was somehow distantly and nebulously unfair, in a way she couldn’t quite explain to herself, but knew.) Lizzie tried to help, too, as much as she could. She ate food without complaint, even when it tasted bad, and she looked after Boots, and she tried to ponder as little as possible. Pondering lead to thinking, and thinking lead to terrible places.

Lizzie thought about that place underground that had swallowed her brother and her little sister and her father somehow, and shuddered, and tried not to any more. This was difficult, as there was very little Lizzie did better than think, and even less that she did quite as often. Gloomy caverns and giant rats wriggled up into her brain like vines and set their hooks like acidic thorns, and when she struggled, she bled horror. So she had to learn to deal with her fear on her own more, because her mother or Gregor could be there often but not always, just enough to make it all quite miserable. (Her father couldn’t help, he was too much of a reminder.) It wasn’t a good time. Not much was good, but that was fairly normal. Some was, and that was normal, too.

Jedidiah was a friend - an only friend, because brilliance and strangeness are not things that fade easily, but he was as brilliant and strange as she in his own way, so that was okay. She couldn’t tell him these family secrets that strangled her with fear, but he could distract her with puzzles and word play, and the secrets of electric mechanical things which hum and whirr, more his than hers. (Her family didn’t have a computer, and his did, or else they probably would have shared in it equally.)

But things weren’t so bad, really. There was still food at home, and family, and puzzles, and oranges, and siblings going out sledding.

Then the man her father is crying on the phone, and her siblings don’t come back.

It is that moment, when she hears, that she knows all her most terrible thoughts - the ones that she had to be careful about thinking, because they drove her to shuddering fear too quickly - were right, so right, and it wasn’t over at all, and never would be. The caves will never let them go.

For better or worse, she’s right, and it teaches her an early lesson about trusting herself and her instincts. The days pass, cold and weary and sad and afraid, and she thinks about the caves. She doesn’t panic, oddly enough. Not much, anyway. The worst has already happened, what is there to fear about the caves themselves anymore? Instead, she learns them in memory, thinking back over all the stories Gregor told, and everything she knows. At the library, she looks up caves. She looks up bats. She looks up rats, and that’s one of the days where she does cry in fear, sitting there in the echoey library. (A fussy librarian tries to help her out, for a spectacularly unhelpful and not-calming version of help.)

Sometimes the caves give, like when her brother comes back with a bag full of riches and Lizzie sees all that terrible worry fade on her mother’s face. Sometimes the caves take away, too. Gregor thinks she doesn’t see him with that scrap of strange paper; Gregor still doesn’t understand that young and girl - even as much as she is those things - doesn’t mean she can’t be sneaky enough to see him with paper in his pocket, paper that can only come from the Underland. She sees the signs and portents, such as they are, and like an oracle of old she interprets them and fears wearily, like someone who knows the end is coming and can’t even be bothered to think otherwise anymore. The caves are a capricious god, and give or take, the caves will never let them go.

Lizzie turns eight.

Living in the shadow of the caves, the fear tastes gloomy and damp, clammy against her neck and the palms of her hands. Like the damp (and the cold, too) it seeps into everything. In the dim halo that the caves put around everything for her, everything is just that bit more; more dangerous, more desperate, more inspiring of fear. Gregor forgets to pick her up at school; a sign. The cold getting into everything; a bad omen. She grins at Gregor’s preoccupation with the mirror, because otherwise that, too, will become a portent, and she couldn’t bear it if she had nothing that was not something to scare her. School isn’t fear-inducing, but aside from Jedidiah, it is miserable, so that doesn’t count.

So she get ready for the storm the way a mouse would; she prepares, any way she knows how. She reads about the terrifying things, and only cries and whimpers once or twice or half a dozen times, which is almost the same thing. Lizzie can’t afford to lose herself, she has things to do, she has to do her best for her family. Gregor needs to practice echolocation for the next time he goes down there, even if only he and she know that there will be a next time.

“Next time” comes in a swarm of rats. Everyone’s moving, trying to run, and she can feel the fear in her mouth, like licking copper pipes and eating raw spoonfuls of cinnamon. She can’t stop now, she can’t, but she does. The hissing in her ears complements the clacking and shrieking of the rats; the chorus they make is hellish. Her fingers feel jittery, buzzing like bees. The world narrows out. She can’t breathe. Lizzie can’t breathe.

Mom is going to go into the caves too, no, you can’t, please, once you go in they never let you go.

That is when Lizzie learns the term “panic attack.”

"I can't be the one waiting and wondering what's happening to the rest of you. Not this time." His mom set Boots down and wrapped her arms around Lizzie. "You know what I'm talking about, don't you, Lizzie?"

She does. It was so miserable, waiting, the second time her siblings were gone. Lizzie understands why her mother feels ready to feed herself to the caves. But with four out of six, they could never hope to be free here. Lizzie offers to feed herself to the monster, too, because she has to do her best for her family. Lizzie is so guilty and greedily glad when they tell her no.

“Can we go - away?” she pants through the panic. It’s not a very good plan - she’s only eight, after all - but it’s the best and only one she can think of. Virginia sounds like hope; it sounds like a distant salvation.

Still, she’s no Oracle. When she sees that massive furry face - Nike, winged victory, haha - it doesn’t occur to her until later that with that one glimpse, she might have as easily sold her soul to the caves as if she’d lived down there the rest of her life.

Weeks pass. Fear haunts her aplenty, like rough bristles scrubbing her skin raw, but she doesn’t get more panic attacks. Not yet. That’ll come later. (Gregor’s birthday happens. She makes a card. Her father gets worse, but on the upside, she finally feels comfortably at home saying “her” and “father” and even sometimes “Dad”, so there’s that.)

Alone with only her father and her grandmother, she was the most capable one in the home. It taught her some interesting lessons about getting things done. She went to school and walked herself home, made breakfast and rationed lunch and dinner, came up with cover stories and told them so well that her brother’s friends bring over his homework. Lizzie felt really quite business-like and sufficient. Only in hindsight would she understand how much of a child she still was.

The caves give, sometimes even what they took away in the first place. Lizzie got her brother and her sister back; but she didn’t get her mom.

These are the axises that Lizzie, age 8, is built around: she is smart, and nervous, and has every right to the latter and need of the former. Lizzie has a brother Gregor, who takes care of her and a sister Boots and a father and a grandmother, all but the first of whom she herself takes care of, too. Mrs. Cormaci lives downstairs, and she helps. She has a mother who isn’t here, because the caves have swallowed most of her family alive and spit them back only on sufferance. The caves have declined to spit her mother back out at this time. The shadow they cast over everyone’s life is unmistakable.

As much as she wants to, Lizzie can’t bear going down to find her mother. She’s tried, and it didn’t work.

Here’s the thing: the caves have devoured everyone who’s gone down into their belly. In some logic-illogical part of her, she is the last bastion of the uneaten. How can she give herself up, and unmoor her family from the surface entirely? This is not what she’s reasoned out, calmly and politely. This is the barbed-wire tug of her instinctual hindbrain. When she fights, she can’t help but lose.

Instead, Lizzie listens to the stories, to try to inoculate herself. That, too, doesn’t work, but it does do something: she learns about Ripred, the mentor. Ripred’s teachings have probably saved her brother’s life. Ripred, who has no one. Ripred, who is outcast, and strange, like her. It’s a nice, clean thing to fret about. She does.

Everything seems stable now. Good, just in time for camp. She hates it, and she’s so afraid. What if…? what if…? must be the sound of her pulse by now, but they reassure her, despite the cringing in her gut, and she goes.

What happened at camp didn’t matter, no matter how good or bad it might have been. The way her stomach drops out from under her when she comes back to no Gregor, no Boots - they were the first to go down, they were always the most thoroughly swallowed - erases all of it.

Her thoughts start going, and they can’t be stopped. Like relapse, like plague, like death. Because all of these things start to happen, and they just keep getting worse, and she can’t take care of anything anymore, because things have gotten so so bad. Gregor is older than she is; Gregor is better at keeping their dying little family afloat. He can help. Grandma is so sick, and so is Dad. Gregor must come home.

That’s how she finds herself giving up.

Lizzie feeds her soul to the Underland. It is everything she feared it was; blood, and fighting, and terrible monsters. She throws up.

There’s also Ripred. He is more than she dreamed, mostly because she never dreamed farther than strangeness and loneliness. Ripred is a kind voice saying math problems when she’s panicking. He’s a complex puzzle, calling her princess. He’s perfect.

The situation, of course, is death and looming destruction, and horrible. But there’s Ripred, and there’s a puzzle, and the puzzle can make things better if only she can solve it. Lizzie doesn’t have to be helpless anymore, she can be as smart as she pleases and it can only make things better, and that, she finds, makes all the difference.

The lesson she learns about fighting back is worth almost everything.

In the code room she made more friends than she has in years of grade school. Ripred was right - they all thought like her, strange and too brilliant. And they liked her, too, which is - there were no words for it. Min thought she was brilliant, and admired her for it. Daedalus told her  that her thoughts dip and swerve like a bat in flight. Reflex enjoyed how she can spin thoughts like webs, and also how she didn’t make much noise. Heronian could match her twist for turn, and then some. Ripred guided her, guided them all, like the conductor of an orchestra. The puzzle was the most frustrating of its kind that she had ever experienced, of course; that somehow made it almost fun.

The Underland ate her alive, but aside from the fear - and the war - and the dying, and having her mother slip out of reach yet again - she was okay. Lizzie was actually okay. Once her brother gets back alive, she’s more than okay, even.

Lizzie was learning to fight back.

The day brought its full weight to bear on her after it ended, and she wakes up from a nightmare and hurtles straight into a panic attack. She can’t go to Gregor, he’s the warrior, he needs to sleep. Instead, she stumbles out into the main area and tries to keep quiet and not throw up.

Instead, she finds Ripred.

“Slow, deep breaths,” he said, curling around her where she huddled on the floor. “Tell me what two times the cubed root of twenty-seven is.”

“The,” Lizzie panted, “It’s - six.”

“The square root of one third of twelve.”

“T-two.”

“Twelve squared.”

“One hundred and, and forty four.”

“Do you know why I’m here like this? Instead of working with that great white brat out there.” A pause, in which Lizzie’s slow panting sounded unusually loud. “Thirty-nine cubed.”

“Fif...” Lizzie breathed, mind working furiously. “Fifty nine thousand...three hundred and nineteen.”

“Not working for, of course; not even in his wildest dreams would I work for someone quite so bad at thinking.”

Lizzie made a high-pitched coughing sort of noise; an exceedingly strangled giggle.

Ripred regarded her, a slight smirk twitching in his whiskers. “He really is terrible at it. Seventeen squared, divided by three.”

“Ninety six...and, one third,” Lizzie whispered, bringing her knees up to her chest and leaning back against the rat’s side.

“And what is that divided by three?”

“Thirty two and one ninth.”

“It was because a long time ago - doubtless before even your noble idiot brother was born - I decided something,” said Ripred softly and firmly.

“Deh-decided what?” Lizzie asked quietly.

“I decided that all these wars between humans and fliers and gnawers - they simply had to end. Everything had to change, because we just couldn’t keep doing this anymore. Seventy four divided by three.” Ripred’s tail - a massive thing, a good bit longer than Lizzie was tall and thicker around than her arms - curled around and tucked itself neatly under Ripred’s paws. He was settled in a tidy c-shaped curve around Lizzie, with his paws tucked almost under himself; Lizzie thought about the stereotypical “cat-loaf” and almost burst into mildly hysteric giggles.

“Twenty four,” she said instead, confidently, “and two thirds.” Lizzie was in the rhythm of it now, soothing and steady. She felt better, too; enough that she felt okay carding her fingers through the warm, soft fur of Ripred’s flank, which was wrapped around her like a wall guarding her from herself. They sat in silence for a minute or two, a very little girl and a very big rat, just taking comfort. Lizzie hadn’t ever come down from an attack so not-as-terrible-as-it-could-be before; it was nice. Ripred settled down a little further with a sigh, rolling a little so he was on his side a bit more comfortably.

“I had pups once, you know,” the old rat said wistfully. “One of them was...very much like you.”

She startled a little, and looked up at Ripred’s face; he was staring off into the distance. “Really?” asked Lizzie.

“Really,” Ripred nodded. “She’s long dead, now. Probably longer than you’ve been alive. The square root of sixteen?” Ripred said with a ratty sort of wistful smile.

“Four,” Lizzie giggled once, pressing the side of her face against Ripred’s shoulder, “That’s easy.”

“Easy for you,” he teased.

Lizzie giggled more, and buried her entire face in the fur of his side. “I didn’t know you were a dad,” she eventually murmured.

Ripred nodded, and Lizzie felt the movement more than she actually saw it. “I was,” he said gravely. “I had a wife, and four little pups; five of the most clever, vicious creatures in existence, and oh how I loved them.” He chuckled. “And yes, one little doe pup was a lot like you. Shy, and small, and so pretty like her mother with that silver fur of hers. She loved games and puzzles, and she was so very very good at them. Like you,” he said softly, bumping her gently with his shoulder

“You really think I’m good at them?” Lizzie asked.

Ripred grinned, and nudged her brusquely with his nose. An observant soul might have called it a nuzzle, and no matter how Ripred denied having a heart they would be absolutely right. “Absolutely,” the great gnawer said. “Better now?” The great arc of fur around her was warm, like a blanket, or maybe that was the relief rushing in.

So they talked, Lizzie and the rat, about names like Silksharp and Hesperides and words like flood and phrases like “I wanted to die.” Lizzie felt the shade of a little dead rat girl settle on her, the responsibility of Silksharp, and found that it actually felt more like a mantle than a burden. A gift.

“Yes. That's when I decided it all had to change.”

Lizzie is changed.

Elizabeth Campbell is not the same after the Underland. The Underland means so much to her now. The caves, which swallowed her family alive. War, in all its hideousness. A rat the size of a monster truck in white, carving out her brother’s heart, but only almost literally. A rat the size of a smallish van in well-scarred grey, giving her back her own, only almost literally. Death, and bats.

Her old prophecy - that once devoured, neither she nor her family would ever be free of the caves - has become almost a lie. The Underland had let them go, all the way to Virginia; but still she was wrong, on two counts, because their memories would never really leave them, nor the scars that were made in them ; and now, now it was all changed, because she didn’t fear that anymore. If anything, the caves let them go, and the letting-go of them hurts.

She misses Ripred.

But Ripred isn’t gone from her, not really. His impact was so small, compressed into what, mere days? Weeks, at a stretch? And yet his impact on her was so great, she’s so changed. Ripred gave her courage, or at least an example of it, and a map to go looking for it.

Courage and strength is making a difference; if you run from things that scare you they just chase you; you have to learn how to stand and face and fight. These are the lessons she learned from Ripred; these are her new axioms. She’s a fighter of sorts now. He taught her that, how to be a warrior in her own right, even if it didn’t involve a sword. A warrior should have both proper armor and weapon for all her battles. Her mind couldn’t be a keener weapon; Silksharp’s silver mantle on her shoulders is all the armor she needs.

(Sitting on his shoulders in negotiations, her weight on him the weight of Silksharp to remind him, she carried that weight like a triumph. Silksharp will always be the name of her heart and its strength, because her heart is her center and her strength is her mind and her wits and her greatest treasure. By these things, and always by these things; this is how she triumphs.)

So let me introduce you to a woman you would barely know.

She is brilliant, and she is strange, often, and if she seems shy, it’s only because you haven’t seen how boldly she pursues her dreams.

She’s a cryptographer/cryptanalyst who is famous throughout her field - revolutionizes it so often that some journals call her “the mother of modern code-breaking,” as Isaac Newton was father of physics and René Descartes mathematics - because she’s always liked puzzles, and someone once told her that she was good at them. Her name is Elizabeth Campbell. Her family calls her Lizzie.

Many an axis is she built around, this Lizzie. The outside world is awe-inspiring, in the old sense of the word - worthy of awe, and she can’t help but approach it, time and again, with absolute fearlessness in her heart; the numbers and letters speak to her in ways both clear and concise, and she translates beautifully for the world, because there is not a single reasonable person left who thinks she is stupid; her family loves her, and will always be there for her. Her sister is either a megafauna expert who dabbles linguistics on the side, or a linguist who dabbles megafauna on the side; she hasn’t decided yet. Her brother is a writer who takes all his pain and uses it to tell the world about war and healing. Her father is a high school science teacher in a tiny town in Virginia. Her mother basks in Virginia sunshine, grows equally a garden in the earth and a garden in her wearied heart under it. Her second best friend Jedidiah is an engineer of brilliant design.

Lizzie remembers the distant times, and it’s just one of the secrets that she carries with her, to put mystery into her smile. (She’s worked for the government more than once, and that kind of makes up most of the rest.) Some of her formative years were spent at MIT, when she went on full scholarship after using her knowledge of machines (from Jedidiah) and codes (from herself) and how to be very, very sneaky (from Ripred) to create anti-virus/firewall software that the very best called “basically unbreakable”. That’s not what she’d known for, though, not to most people; around the world she’s known for her considerable dedication to philanthropy and social causes, especially in the name of peace. “We can not allow,” in her own words, “all the suffering in this world to mean nothing. We have to move forward; whatever caused that suffering, it all has to change.”

It was through the philanthropic efforts that she meets and met Luciana Yaneth Salazar, in Chile. She is Bolivian-born, Brazilian-raised, Israeli Jewish by faith, reporter by profession. By nature, she is a hell-raiser. Her politics lean comfortably towards “won’t let the Man keep me down;” she somehow makes the social-justice vive-la-France retro-hippie look work for her. Her native Portuguese and Hebrew flavor her English in pleasant and interesting ways. She goes by Yana.

Yana is many things - passionate and razor-tongued and stubborn, filled with liquid fire, quick to retort, quick to apologize when her retorts strike deep and draw blood, which happens often. Lizzie knows all these things, because Yana is her best friend in the world. Also, Yana is the person on whose finger she put a ring and to whom she said “Yes” and “I do,” and who Lizzie kisses like she needs her to breathe. But they always say you should marry your best friend, and damn, they were right; turns out passion hones her brain like a whetstone. She writes some of her best code on Yana’s skin with her tongue.

The mockery of those who can’t believe that a woman like her - no less feminine for her brilliance, skin as smooth and dark as a cave’s heart inherited from shackle-wearing ancestors, a wife in her bed at night - is smarter and richer and kinder and better than them just makes her laugh uproariously. When she was sixteen, a high school English teacher tried to tell her that deviant black trash like herself would never turn out to be anything worthwhile. (She drinks yearly and with great satisfaction to how incredibly wrong she proved him, in the end.) (Also to how Gregor - ever the elder brother, with a rager temper to match - had marched up to him in the middle of an assembly, called him a shit-mouthed whore, and punched him straight in the fucking face, thereby breaking his jaw.) (Also with great satisfaction.)

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Campbell is dauntless and laughing; a savant among savants; different and deviant and so very fucking proud of all of the above; a woman laced in secrets. She walks in beauty. Every time she has to make a presentation to a code-breaker’s convention or Congress, she wears an article of silver silk, because it’s her own personal version of armor. Yana loves to admire (with lips and hands) the small, modest tattoo which Lizzie got when she turned eighteen and decided that the world was hers to change: a tribal-style figure of a silver rat curls across her left shoulder blade, small but defiantly unafraid. In her slender forepaw, Silksharp displays a single puzzle piece.

**Here, see; this is the girl. I'd like you to meet Lizzie Campbell. I think you two are going to be great friends.**


End file.
